throw2016

Poor choice of headline for the original article given 'replicated' indicates success. This was an intensive attempt to replicate but 14 of the 28 did not replicate.

That is a 50 percent failure rate inspite of using over 186 researchers in 60 labs worldwide. The widely reported 2012 study could not replicate nearly 100 of 100 studies. And in this case if this kind of comprehensive effort can't replicate half the studies it raises serious questions about the original studies and adds more fuel to the reproducibility crisis.

Given studies are routinely used to justify and implement policies [1], and taken seriously as points of authority it's not just academic.

There needs to be much larger discussion on the use of studies to direct policy that impact real lives, and the level of oversight, additional replication and other credibility building measures that need to be considered.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001632871...

There seems to be a significant ethical problem of dehumanization and predation in the tech community that must be analyzed and understood.

Here are people living in a civilized world with rules and regulations and posture as civilized human beings who function in an ethical society.

But at work they seem to be operating in neolitic wild lands engaging in increasingly invasive predatory behavior that systematically reduces the entirety of the human population going about their daily lives into objects of profit lacking agency, merely tools to be stalked and analyzed for revenue, to be prodded for value in any way possible. There is a dehumanization here with no respect of personal space, privacy and basic human dignity.

This would not be as bad if there was explicit consent and self declared transparency of the all processes in play, and commitments to ethical frameworks of operation. It's the surreptitious, misleading and often deceptive communication and behavior that betrays their willful complicity that is troubling.

This seems more like an empty threat and a bargaining position. If they wanted to shut down they would, not leak to the media incessantly about their intentions.

Why are they pushing amp on publishers if this content doesn't matter to Google? This is extremely self serving and then trying to play innocent is disingenuous and predatory.

There are no principles at stake here, only the exploitative business interests of a monopolistic business. The standard PR playbook of misinformation, lobbying, 'think tanks' and and 'helpful' opinion pieces is being rolled out, which is the predictable reaction of any well resourced interest hellbent on getting their their way.

It's hypocritical for people to continue to benefit from foss and complain about 'fundamentalists'.

Without that level of commitment no one would have used Linux and all the early immature and amateurish efforts, there are people here who know what a horror some of the efforts were to use and the long journey to today. Would any of the practical minded folks use any of that?

That part of the journey could only be made because of those motivated by ideals. The practical 'middle ground' mindset would not have delivered the rich open source world we know today.

If you don't subscribe to the ethics or values driving it it's perfectly ok, but mature discussion needs to recognize that commitment is required to achieve anything. Simply looking at the results and failing to appreciate what it took to get here is a recipe for failure in any endeavour.

This article is a one sided look at how publishers benefit from Google without considering the other side, at all. This is not helpful for informed discussion.

If Google is 'helping' these publishers then the counterpoint is these publishers are also 'helping' Google by making the content at their cost in the first place. Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?

Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality, which will take billions of dollars of value off Google, lower its value to users and make room for other options.

Let's not pretend Google is not benefiting from news content. And since people clearly value news content producers can generate value outside of Google, and Google will need to pay to make money from that content or do without. Targeting a predatory model will make space for better models and ideas to emerge.

This is disingenuous. 'Protecting democracy from misinformation' is misinformation. How do you do 'protect democracy' without erecting 'ministry of truth' structures and becoming undemocratic?

It's a bit sad many champions of democracy are realizing they can't handle real dissent. They seem more comfortable with control, limits and useless debates on media structures and platforms they can influence and control than the kind of actual dissent provided by Assange, Snowden and the wider platform of the Internet that allows people to freely exchange ideas.

Let's take it to the extreme, if citizens elect an flat earther or an extremist running on hate then its not a problem with democracy but a reflection of deeper problems with your society and education system.

Misinformation, propaganda, fake news are as old as human society and used by all countries and special interests, and can be addressed well outside the fundamental structures of democracy, free speech, dissent and free press.

Let's leave all the war criminals from Iraq so we have repeats in Libya and Syria. Let's forgot about the bankers and fraud. Let's not do anything about the NSA and liars like Clapper. Let's instead get Assange. This makes a lot of sense, but only if you are a pretend democracy.

That should read the US regime is preparing to 'persecute' Julian Assange and should be a reality check for anyone remotely concerned about democracy, free press and dissent.

Wonder how long before he is sacked. Rare instance of establishment official bucking the narrative. These kind of reports are usually made about 'inconvenient regimes'.

Austerity [1] is a dubious predatory ideology pushed by neoliberal economists parroting the mantra of freemarkets, privatization while pushing crude policies that benefit special interests. The modus operandi is defund public services, raise a ruckus about ensuing chaos and build the rationale for privatization.

A country with its own currency is a not a household. In the case of the US the dollar being the global reserve currency provides even more freedom compared to any other country. Simplistic household type comparisons by agenda driven economists about complex modern economies are grossly misleading.

You cannot bailout banks to the tune of trillions and them impose austerity on the population, this is not capitalism or freemarkets, its gross corruption. Where did this money come from? What about all the scares of 'runway inflation' by such massive injections, why were creditors bailed out and not debtors? Why shouldn't these funds be spent on the people the government represent and not special interests?

Mark Blyth [1], Michael Hudson [2], Steve Keen and Joseph Stiglitz [3] are doing a lot of work on neoliberal economics and dubious policies like austerity.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQuHSQXxsjM

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBi00-LBUnQ

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzCRCX_gwII

There is a great dissonance between what people claim and what they do and without bridging these gaps discussions on ethical issues become useless.

For instance commentators here may stridently criticize Facebook and others and yet if they were in Zuckerberg or Sandberg's position may do no differently. It's techies who went to town about liberty and freedom and now are building the most invasive and creepy surveillance systems. This is perhaps the biggest betrayal of our generation.

There are always excuses but if you cannot stick to stated principles its your responsibility to examine yourself and not make claims you will not follow through in circumstances of power.

Neoliberalism, Milton Friedman and the free market crowd have been demonizing government for decades now and successfully lobbied for the removal of regulations since the 80s leading to the housing bubble, education loans and exploding tuition costs, buybacks and rampant financialization.

This banking crisis, fraud, education loan bubble is the direct result of 30 years of neoliberal free market policies. Yet instead of owning up to their mistakes in an act of brazen revisionism and fraud they are blaming the government for listening to them, and this is taken seriously. This is ideology.

A govt hijacked to promote special interests is not a government, its a plutocracy.

Privacy is not just some vague 'great to have' value. The opposite of privacy is surveillance, which democracy by its very definition excludes, but happens to be a key feature of totalitarianism.

Everyone knows the consequences of surveillance, there is no need to wait for consequences to be concerned. The casual disregard and lack of appreciation of the values that make modern societies possible is concerning.

Hand waving away surveillance infrastructure and seeking to normalize invasive surveillance is in the interest of companies like Google who profit from it, but for citizens to be blase suggests a reckless disregard of historical record and the societies they live in.

How is this different from credit scores?

This is the perfect example of why unconstrained self interest and greed are destructive for the ecosystems that sustain them.

There are no limits to greed and that's why there are serious constraints on all sorts of things that can damage the commons and why the only legitimate force is the common good.

And a lesson for the tech community who have seen first hand the rapid transformation of seemingly well meaning ethical actors into self obsessed exploitative bad actors completely divorced from ethics.

Facebook, Twitter and others are partnering with organizations like the Atlantic Council to brazenly censor content [1] with little to no pushback. There is no basis to affect outrage about some far off country.

Thousands of accounts have been removed with no evidence, due process or transparency. Anything can be labelled as 'fake news', bots, propaganda etc and censored.

These new 'ministry of truth' structures are being used to delegitimize dissent and create an environment of conformity and suspicion where dissent and anything that challenges the status quo is tarred and banned.

It sometimes feels people are more interested in demonizing China and others and holding them to standards they do not hold democratic governments to.

[1] https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/11/09/facebook-allows-gove...

A new CEO will not just come in and fire a senior exec unless there is a lot of behind the scenes activity we are not privy to or the CEO already has someone lined up for the position.

A lot of CEOs have got into the habit of building teams with people they already have trust with, in which case this whole article is overthinking.

If not that it's strange that the first thing the CEO did without even working with him is to fire him. If things were so bad that why wasn't he talked to earlier? That could mean some 'history'. These things are so contextual its dangerous to try to draw any insights or lessons.

Choice and harm are two different concepts, the first is an economic context that is supposed to punish bad actors, the second is a societal concept of social harm which is an ethical concept like child labour.

In many cases the economic concept of choice is idealized and doesn't work in the real world. For instance what choice does a consumer concerned about privacy have beyond Android and IOS, or in telecom, oil and other polluting industries and other dysfunctional markets? The network effects of social media cannot be ignored and one may often be forced to participate in a damaging environment that does not respect consumers privacy and basic rights.

Consumers may want a privacy respecting Internet and products but there is no way for them to affect that outcome only through choice, so choice on its own is not empowering. You can only choose what is available. And this is where in democratic societies democratic institutions are expected to step in to limit harm.

Trains and planes are different transport systems and relative safety records have little to do with the skills of human drivers and more with the nature of the systems.

This 'roads are so dangerous' is part of the self driving crowd scaremongering program. That 'humans can't be trusted' but their tech can obviously.

But when looking at the global picture and the sheer number of cars in all sorts of traffic conditions on roads everyday without incident this narrative falls apart.

We need far more facts, data and critically 'contextualization' than sweeping disingenuous statements by parts of the tech community motivated by self interest and greed.

For academic research the value proposition seems more credible. But even there given the reproducibility crisis the methodology and tools need to be revisited, and perhaps these kind of lazy surveys and data analysis are part of the problem.

As for customers few companies if any in the world has customer service approaching 'entailing differences in customer perception', most are quite happy to have people wait on phones endlessly or fail to address glaring deficiencies in products or services.

With so much low hanging fruit waiting to be addressed in customer service this obsession with surveys and 'customer experience' seems to be driven by other forces ie continuing obsession with data and metrics by sections of the workforce as panacea and distraction from real changes. But great exit for the brothers, nice targeting, if there is a demand why shouldn't they benefit.

This is not surprising. Most people here are already neck deep in implementing surveillance technology. They are the last ones to find it creepy or disturbing, if anything its in their interest to brush it off and pretend its the most normal thing as this thread has done.

That's why discussions about privacy, surveillance and ethics are best had in a context where their significance is not diluted by conflicting personal interests. Posting about these issues is tech communities is like asking individuals rushing to the gold rush with dreams of riches to inquire about their thoughts on democracy. Pointless.

It's strange to see the Romanian government try to use the GPDR to harass journalists. Governments have become increasingly shameless about going after the press so no cover is required.

The UK government [1] has done this to multiple journalists including the Guardian, BBC [2], Greenwald's partner famously among others under the 'terrorism act'.

The US govt [3] is liberally using subpoenas, court processes and threatening new laws [4] to force journalists to give up sources.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/14/government-ter...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/police-use-terro...

[3] https://pressfreedomtracker.us/blog/increasing-number-journa...

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/us/james-risen-faces-jail...

[6] https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/press_subpoena_sour...

You do not see the difference between conventional warfare between armies and dropping untested new weapons on mass destruction on civilian populations?

This is a deliberate calculated war crime. Hundreds of thousands of people were burned, suffocated and boiled to death in seconds let alone the radiation for no good reason. No educated person is unaware of the horror of launching a nuclear bomb on a civilian population. This is an act of evil.

How many countries have used nuclear weapons? Why do you think nuclear weapons are controlled and treated as a separate class of weapons under strict control?

This is not about running Linux distros on your phone.

This is about your phone doubling up as a Linux PC and being able to use your phone as a PC seamlessly when required by simply connecting it to a monitor. This can be super useful for a lot of users.

Current 8 core SOCs with 4 to 8 GB RAM should be more than usable and its great Samsung has been trying to make this happen. And there is nothing 'crappy' about Ubuntu 16.04 especially given all distros are the same underneath. Why this name calling against Ubuntu?

Dropping a nuclear bomb on a civilian population is an act of madness, doing it twice is is beyond ethical discourse.

We are just 70 years out but these crimes against humanity will haunt for generations to come.

It seems more likely more fundamental innovations are going to come from academia with a culture of seriousness and decades of work without returns.

On this side there is a strong tendency to be blinded by hype, underestimate problems or wish them away with naive desperation that things will just happen based more on hope than reality.

We saw that with the self driving crowd underestimating the problems and overestimating the existing technology, and now with the AI folks, who are already guilty of perpetuating hype knowing fully well that their extremely limited definition of 'AI' is nothing like what the world understands by AI.

All the privacy shenanigans, crypto disaster, self driving cars and AI leave the reputation of tech community in a very bad place.

Ignorance as a word is only meaningful in a narrow context, usually in context 'of a what' and hopefully with some facts to prove the accusation.

Without any moorings or context the word ignorance loses all meaning and value. Accusing any group xyz or a nebulous 'other' of ignorance is like accusing HN readers of ignorance of history, because it is logically and physically impossible to prove any such assertion of any group, and you are left with circular logic that points to source assertion as evidence ie uninformed prejudice.

Democracy is about everyone voting, it does not seek to make a judgement or value claims on individuals in any way and if you accept the concept your only job is vote and support the unequivocal right of everyone to vote.

Any arguments about individuals that disqualify them in your personal opinion would need a wider argument against democracy as a concept.

This just seems so much myth making and gratuitous glorification so people can feel special just getting a job. The famed difficulty of getting hired creates a sense of elitism and exclusiveness and perpetuates a culture of insecurity.

This is very cult like, If people are indoctrinated to think that they are part of an elite group they will be devoted and would look at leaving as a step down. Cults are a great business model as the followers are very devoted.

It suits the agenda of employers to construct this and target individuals who derive all sense of identity and self worth from their jobs and when employed will work their asses off in a constant reaffirmation of 'specialness' just to retain their sense of self worth. Very cult like.

Here is an interesting discussion and debate between 2 experts in the field on sex differences.

Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender [1] reports even something as simple as telling girls before a maths test that this is a test in which girls have done well results in dramatically higher scores suggesting the field is still in its infancy and fundamental questions about gender roles and culture remain.

Simon Baron-Cohen is also well known in the field for his work on autism and stands on the ‘essentialist’ side of gender differences and as readers will note in his review [2] of Cordelia Fine’s book and the ensuing 3 part debate [3] [4] [5] with her that there are far too many important new questions raised and many that remain unresolved.

Everything from past studies, preconceptions, cultural bias, data, methodology to conclusions remain in question leaving very little room to draw any kind of conclusions.

In light of this perhaps its best to leave the field of sex differences to experts who continue to study but do not have the answers or data to draw any conclusions.

[1] https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-23/edition-11/batt...

[2] https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-23/edition-11/book...

[3] http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-23/edition-12/forum

[4] http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-1/letter...

[5] http://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-24/edition-2/letter...

Prosperous for whom? There are people who are struggling to make ends meet, have their houses dispossessed, can't get steady jobs or afford housing, in student debt they can't pay, facing racism and violence from the state now and segregation in the recent past so its a matter of individual experiences and perspectives.

There are entire countries in the middle east that have been destroyed with millions dead, millions of refugees, families and infrastructure destroyed and set back a hundred years without consequences. And more are threatened as we embrace this new 'violence free' world.

On one side there are sweeping claims without evidence of the world getting 'better'. These kind of wide assertions would need a lot more data points and discussion by historians, economists and sociologists to get to some kind of 'truth' that is not propaganda.

Fortunately there are detailed works by academics like Piketty, Stiglitz and others with real data on stagnant wages and inequality over 40 years, on how gains are going to a small minority worldwide for those who are interested. Some may want to feel better because the current system favours them and that's perfectly valid. But sweeping claims about improvements sound as credible as the trillion dollar sv elite wanting to solve the worlds problems while failing to address the homelessness in their backyard.

It will be difficult for engineers to wash their hands off this level of surveillance, as they are building it.

All the dissent is coming from other places, we have not had any protests, resignations or even leaks to warn the public about the level of surveillance underway.

This betrays an indifference even support among engineers of invasive surveillance that others find abhorrent.

There is a sharp contrast between the unequivocal indignation and outrage similar stories generate on other countries as a reflection of something greater while here they seem to dissipate into a factoid with no larger implications.

IBM like Redhat is a long time contributor and both are commercial companies driven by profits and shareholders so this does not change things.

However no one can deny Redhat has a disproportional influence in pushing its interests that may not always be in the community's best interests. These now move to IBM.

The bigger problem is the growing tilt of open source towards corporate interests so much so that dependence on individual companies passes without notice or scrutiny.

This is perhaps not the end result that motivated the initial community of open source contributors over the last 20 years and if we do not find ways to motivate the next generation open source will likely become a shell of itself, propped up by paid contributors and self interest.